The Fits (2015) on Netflix
Eleven-year-old Toni boxes at a Cincinnati community center and is drawn to the girls' dance troupe. She tries out and works to fit in as violent fits strike the dancers.
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- Netflix1.9/5
- IMDb6.6/105,312 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Toni, eleven, trains as a boxer with her brother Jermaine in the gym at Cincinnati's Lincoln Community Center, where a girls' dance team also practices. She watches the dancers through the door, then tries their moves alone in the empty gym until Jermaine catches her and tells her to try out. At the audition, Legs and Karisma, the team's captains, show the hopefuls the clap back call, and Toni keeps rehearsing on her own. She befriends Beezy and Maia as she learns the drills. Then Legs collapses during a session and is taken to a hospital, and Karisma takes over the practices while the girls wonder what is causing the fits.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Fits (2015)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Anna Rose Holmer's script was inspired by real outbreaks of seizure-like attacks and uncontrollable spasms, including the dancing plague of 1518 and a 2007 case in Virginia where high school girls suffered twitching arms and legs that eventually resolved itself.
- Movement consultant Celia Rowlson-Hall trained Royalty Hightower to appear bad at dancing at the start of the film, and choreographed each girl's fit individually in isolation, so the rest of the cast only saw each performance on the day it was filmed.
- Anna Rose Holmer discovered the Cincinnati-based Q Kidz Dance Team on YouTube while pitching to the Venice Biennale College; the writers adapted the story around the team, Holmer relocated to Cincinnati, hired coach Marquicia Jones-Wood as a producer, and 45 of several hundred Q Kidz dancers were cast.
- Holmer, co-writer and producer Lisa Kjerulff and editor and co-writer Saela Davis spent a year developing a Tumblr of ideas for the film and submitted it with an outline and pitch statement; the pitch won a €150,000 grant that funded the 11-month production.
- Anna Rose Holmer said the film had the most female department heads and most gender-balanced crew she had ever worked with, crediting the three women who made the hiring decisions, and said it mattered with a cast of 45 teenage girls.
